Teachers’ Attitude on Students’ Performance in Teaching and Learning of Mathematics at Presbyterian Senior High School – Bechem

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to ascertain teachers' attitudes and its impact on students' performance in the classroom at Presbyterian Senior High School-Bechem with regard to mathematics in the Tano South Municipality in the Ahafo Region, Ghana. The explanatory sequential mixed method research design was adopted for the study. The teacher population of the school was 192 and purposeful sample was used to select the 30 mathematics teachers. Simple random sampling method was used to select the 171 students from the four classes out the 27 class for the study. In the qualitative study, a sample size of 15 of mathematics teachers, were selected randomly for the focus group discussion. The instrument used for this study was questionnaire. Percent, mean, and standard deviations, were used to analyse the quantitative data while verbatim responses of the interview of the focus group was used to analysed the qualitative data. The finding indicates that positive attitudes improves students‘ academic performance whilst negative attitudes results to decreases in students‘ performance. It is recommended that teachers should regularly develop positive attitude towards the teaching of Mathematics since they are the role model and attitude is about sharing emotions, teachers need to be taught how to develop and use emotional intelligence in the classroom to better students‘ performance.